Financial Incentives to Beat COVID-19

7 min readDec 10, 2020

We’re all a bit low on cash at the moment, what with Covid’s effect on the economy and our jobs. I doubt anyone would turn down a bit of extra money right now. But we can use the current situation to all our benefit if we incentivise good pandemic behavior: we get paid at a time when many of us can’t work, and we slow the disease down. Win-win.

Giving out free money by itself would actually solve many of the problems brought by the pandemic. But we can do more than that. By making the payments conditional, we can tackle the disease as well as the financial insecurity it brought. And the hardest-to-reach groups are those who need the money the most.

£500 Self-isolation payment

The UK government created a self-isolation payment scheme to give those who need to quarantine a £500 payment. Given the meagre offerings in the form of statutory sick pay (£95.85/week) and business support (ha), this is actually a fairly decent amount of money to tide someone over for the 14-day isolation period. But there’s a catch.

Hardly anyone is able to access it. It’s fiendishly difficult to qualify for the payment, and the application process is a pain in the neck. Those who are able to meet the criteria are the lowest paid, meaning that those on a higher wage actually get less money to self-isolate.

[sick pay is] “clearly not going to be enough to persuade people to do something which is essentially a public good.”
Institute for Fiscal Studies spokesperson

There’s just too great a risk of people thinking, “well, I feel OK, so I’ll just go in to work”; especially in our presentee culture. A couple of weeks ago the Health Secretary said “Why in Britain do we think it’s acceptable to soldier on and go into work if you have flu symptoms or a runny nose, thus making your colleagues ill?”; and uh, the reason seems pretty clear, actually:

Source

What we should do differently:

Make the £500 self-isolation payment unconditional. That’s it. It means there is no reason to refuse to quarantine, it would cost less to administer, and it’s simple and easy to understand. It also reinforces the importance of isolating: this is something you are being paid to do. You get told to isolate, you get a cheque and you stay home — simple. And if you’re notified more than once, you get £500 each time.

We’re able to implement safeguards to prevent abuse, because we’ve successfully prevented millions of applicants from getting the money we said we’d give them currently. We also put enormous hurdles in the way of people accessing regular benefits they’re entitled to, so we know all about gatekeeping public funds in this country.

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£500 vaccine payment

There is hesitation among the general public to get the jab, and this doubt has been fuelled by our incompetent government. But it has been through the same rigorous development and testing process as any other vaccine. It all happened so quickly because governments invested huge amounts into its development; the kind of limitless, readily-available funds that most researchers can only dream of.

And now that we have the vaccine available, we need to make sure enough people will take it to ensure that coveted herd immunity our government kept going on about. It’s hard to gauge people’s level of vaccine hesitancy, or how great an offer of financial recompense would overcome it (now there is a topic for a Ph.D), but £500 is a decent chunk of money.

It also matches the amount given for self-isolation, and this makes it easier to remember and to market. And if, like the isolation payment, it is unconditional, it would underscore the importance of doing it. And who could turn down a free £500, right?

But Shouldn’t the Government Just Give Us the Money Anyway?

Yes, nobody should be struggling to eat or pay their bills at any time, let alone during a pandemic. But the current government’s attitude is one of punishing people into wealth (this doesn’t work), so we need to work with what we’ve got.

There’s also the added factor of incentivisation, which is the whole point of this idea. We want people to do the thing, and we will encourage them to do it by paying them. So making some of the pandemic relief conditional is a necessity if we’re going to effectively control and eradicate the disease.

I still maintain that making the payments a ‘bonus’ on top of any other government support is the right way to go. Everyone should be provided for in a caring society (obviously the problem is that the UK is an uncaring place, and we need to fix that; but one step at a time).

In this country, we work on the premise that if people don’t do something, we should remedy it by causing them hardship. But wouldn’t it be better if we encouraged them to do it with an incentive in the first place?